EVERYBODY KNOWS the scene
from school: a small boy quarrels with a bigger boy. “Hold me back!” he shouts
to his comrades, “Before I break his bones!”

Our government seems to
be behaving in this way. Every day, via all channels, it shouts that it is
going, any minute now, to break the bones of Iran.

Iran
is about to produce a nuclear bomb. We cannot allow this. So we shall bomb them
to smithereens.

Binyamin Netanyahu says
so in every one of his countless speeches, including his opening speech at the
winter session of the Knesset. Ditto Ehud Barak. Every self-respecting
commentator (has anyone ever seen a non-self-respecting one?)writes about it. The media amplify the sound and the fury.

“Haaretz” splashed its
front page with pictures of the seven most important ministers (the “security
septet”) showing three in favor of the attack, four against.

A GERMAN proverb says:
“Revolutions that are announced in advance do not take place.” Same goes for
wars.

Nuclear affairs are
subject to very strict military censorship. Very very strict indeed.

Yet the censor seems to
be smiling benignly. Let the boys, including the Prime Minister and the Minister
of Defense (the censor's ultimate boss) play their games.

The respected former
long-serving chief of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, has publicly warned against the
attack, describing it as “the most stupid idea” he hasever heard”. He explained that he considers it his duty to warn against
it, in view of the plans of Netanyahu and Barak.

On Wednesday, there was a
veritable deluge of leaks. Israel tested a missile that can
deliver a nuclear bomb more then 5000 km away, beyond you-know-where. And our Air
Force has just completed exercises in Sardinia,
at a distance larger than you-know-where. And on Thursday, the Home Front
Command held training exercises all over Greater Tel Aviv, with sirens screaming
away.

All this seems to
indicate that the whole hullabaloo is a ploy. Perhaps to frighten and deter the
Iranians. Perhaps to push the Americans into more extreme actions. Perhaps
coordinated with the Americans in advance.
(British sources, too, leaked that the Royal Navy is training to support an
American attack on Iran.)

It is an old Israeli
tactic to act as if we are going crazy (“The boss has gone mad” is a routine cry
in our markets, to suggest that the fruit vendor is selling at a loss.) We shall
not listen to the US any more. We shall just bomb and
bomb and bomb.

Well, let’s be serious
for a moment.

ISRAEL
WILL not attack Iran. Period.

Some may think that I am
going out on a limb. Shouldn’t I add at least “probably” or “almost certainly”?

No, I won’t. I shall
repeat categorically: Israel
Will NOT Attack Iran.

Since the 1956
Suez adventure, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered an
ultimatum that stopped the action, Israel has never
undertaken any significant military operation without obtaining American consent
in advance.

The
US is Israel’s only dependable supporter in the world
(besides, perhaps, Fiji, Micronesia, the
Marshall Islands, and Palau.) To destroy this relationship
means cutting our lifeline. To do that, you have to be more than just a little
crazy. You have to be raving mad.

Furthermore,
Israel cannot fight a war
without unlimited American support, because our planes and our bombs come from
the US.
During a war, we need supplies, spare parts, many sorts of equipment. During the
Yom Kippur war, Henry Kissinger had an “air train” supplying us around the
clock. And that war would probably look like a picnic compared to a war with Iran.

LET’S LOOK at the map.
That, by the way, is always recommended before starting any war.

The first feature that
strikes the eye is the narrow Strait of Hormuz,
through which every third barrel of the worlds seaborne oil supplies flow.
Almost the entire output of Saudi Arabia,
the Gulf States,
Iraq and Iran has to run
the gauntlet through this narrow sea lane.

“Narrow” is an
understatement. The entire width of this waterway is some 35 km (or 20 miles). That’s about the
distance from Gaza
to Beer Sheva, which was crossed last week by the primitive rockets of the
Islamic Jihad.

When the first Israeli
plane enters Iranian airspace, the strait will be closed. The Iranian navy has
plenty of missile boats, but they will not be needed. Land-based missiles are
enough.

The world is already
teetering on the verge of an abyss. Little Greece is
threatening to fall and take major chunks of the world economy with her. The
elimination of almost a fifth of the industrial nations’ supply of oil would
lead to a catastrophe hard even to imagine.

To open the strait by
force would require a major military operation (including “putting boots on the
ground”) that would overshadow all the US misadventures in
Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Can the US
afford that? Can NATO? Israel
itself is not in the same league.

BUT
ISRAEL
would be very much involved in the action, if only on the receiving end.

In a rare show of unity,
all of Israel’s
service chiefs, including the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, are publicly
opposing the whole idea. We can only guess why.

I don’t know whether the
operation is possible at all. Iran is a very large country, about the size of
Alaska, the nuclear installations are widely dispersed and largely underground.
Even with the special deep penetration bombs provided by the
US, the operation may stall the Iranian efforts
– such as they are - only for a few months. The price may be too high for such
meager results.

Moreover, it is quite
certain that with the beginning of a war, missiles will rain down on Israel –
not only from Iran, but also from Hizbollah, and perhaps also from Hamas. We
have no adequate defense for our towns. The amount of death and destruction
would be prohibitive.

Suddenly, the media are
full of stories about our three submarines, soon to grow to five, or even six,
if the Germans are understanding and generous. It is openly said that these give
us the capabilities of a nuclear “second strike”, if Iran uses its
(still non-existent) nuclear warheads against us. But the Iranians may also use
chemical and other weapons of mass destruction.

Then there is the
political price. There are a lot of tensions in the Islamic world.
Iran
is far from popular in many parts of it. But an Israeli assault on a major
Muslim country would instantly unite Sunnis and Shiites, from Egypt and Turkey
to Pakistan
and beyond. Israel
could become a villa in a burning jungle.

BUT THE talk about the
war serves many purposes, including domestic, political ones.

Last Saturday, the social
protest movement sprang to life again. After a pause of two months, a mass of
people assembled in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. This was quite remarkable,
because on that very day rockets were falling on the towns near the Gaza Strip. Until now, in
such a situation demonstrations have always been canceled. Security problems
trump everything else. Not this time.

Also, many people
believed that the euphoria of the Gilad Shalit festival had wiped the protest
from the public mind. It didn’t.

By the way, something
remarkable has happened: the media, after siding with the protest movement for
months, have had a change of heart. Suddenly all of them, including Haaretz, are
sticking knives in its back. As if by order, all newspapers wrote the next day
that “more than 20,000” took part. Well I
was there, and I do have some idea of these things. There were at least 100,000
people there, most of them young. I could hardly move.

The protest has not spent
itself, as the media assert. Far from it. But what better means for taking
people’s minds off social justice than talk of the “existential danger”?

Moreover, the reforms
demanded by the protesters would need money. In view of the worldwide financial
crisis, the government strenuously objects to increasing the state budget, for
fear of damaging our credit rating.

So where could the money
come from? There are only three plausible sources: the settlements (who would
dare?), the Orthodox (ditto!) and the huge military budget.

But on the eve of the
most crucial war in our history, who would touch the armed forces? We need every
shekel to buy more planes, more bombs, more submarines. Schools and hospitals
must, alas, wait.